Wednesday, December 7, 2016

HeroQuest: A Horde of Orcs

Torendil crept slowly forward, "who knows what traps Zargon may have set," he though. He was acting as the point for his companions, a dwarf, a wizard, and a barbarian, because he had the keenest eyes and the fastest reflexes. If anyone could spot a trap it would be him. Suddenly, Torendil smelled a terrible stench of rotting meat and moldy wool. Then, he heard the sounds of boots on the stone. He quickly nocked his bow before shouting "Orcs!"

HeroQuest is one of my all time favorite games. It's a classic dungeon crawler that puts the players in the shoes of some fairly simple archetypes: wizard, dwarf, elf, and barbarian. No real roleplaying necessary; just the fun of hacking down monsters and looting treasure.

As I tell anyone who will listen, I've been working on painting all the figures from my original set. So far, I've finished all the monsters that would fit on 20mm square bases: goblins, zombies, skeletons, and mummies (but I'm probably going to redo the bases). So when the guys over at Scale Creep asked me to paint a model for their HeroQuest Hero Quest, I obliged and chose an orc as I have eight of them to get painted and I can easily paint four in a batch. Since I was only painting one for Scale Creep, however, I decided to paint four to the same standard and then spend some additional time on one of them. The story of that one can be found here.

The orcs were painted in the standard way I've painted the other few orcs since I started this blog, 50:50 Dark Angels green:Goblin green followed by a shade with Orc Flesh Wash, followed by the base coat, then a layer of Goblin green, and then mixing in Sunburst yellow for highlighting. The clothing was painted with various earthy shades and the leathers with various browns. I also painted the sword blades using pigments and buffable metallic paints. When they were finished, I mounted them on DragonForge Temple bases. For the record, I think these pictures came out better than the ones I used on Scale Creep!

Was it my subconscious that led me to choose the 'leader orc' as your Scale Creep recommendation? Do I secretly think of you as an orcish champion? An exemplar of skulduggery, a paragon of the perverse? Maybe chief, maybe...

Lovely work on these. I've been trying not to batch paint, but I always fall into, I've got this big drop of color X on my palette I should use up. I do try to keep the batches to no more than 5 though.

For me the number definitely depends on what I'm painting anywhere between 3 and 5. But in my basement on the east coast, if I don't batch paint, I get bored waiting for everything to dry. I can probably wet blend down there, lol.